Why Are Olympians Putting Puppies Before People in Sochi?

Why Are Olympians Putting Puppies Before People in Sochi?

A dog basks in the sun as athletes take part in an unofficial cross-country training session in Rosa Khutor, near Sochi, on February 5, 2014.

Photo by KIRILL KUDRYAVTSEV/AFP/Getty Images

The biggest question in the run-up to the 2014 Winter Olympics had nothing to do with sports. As athletes, coaches, and dignitaries streamed in to Sochi, the world waited to see if anyone would be brave enough to speak out about what’s been happening in Russia. In recent days, we’ve gotten a loud and clear answer. “It makes me sad,” said U.S. freeskier Brita Sigourney. “It’s hard to watch,” lamented American skiing silver medalist Gus Kenworthy. “I’m not trying to make a statement,” said U.S. bobsled and skeleton press officer Amanda Bird, adding that she’s “been amazed how much people have been coming up to me and asking about it.”

This sad, hard-to-watch situation is, of course, the plight of Sochi’s stray dogs. As the New York Times reported on Feb. 5, “hundreds of strays [were] facing a death sentence” as the games approached. Though an International Olympic Committee spokesman claimed that “it would be absolutely wrong to say that any healthy dog will be destroyed,” a Russian animal rights advocate told the Times that “about 300 dogs a month were being killed in Sochi,” some of them reportedly with poisoned darts. And according to the Times, many of these dogs are not feral. Rather, they are abandoned pets.

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Upon alighting in Sochi, Sigourney, Kenworthy, Bird, and American snowboarder Lindsey Jacobellis were all inspired to help stave off the canine crisis. Each has declared the intention to adopt a stray, with Kenworthy staying in Russia for a few extra days so he can get the paperwork to adopt multiple puppies.

Who could possibly criticize these Olympians for wanting to save adorable dogs from an almost certain death? Not me. Kudos to Kenworthy, Jacobellis, and other animal lovers who have decided to take a pooch home with them, and for taking a public stand. "I need a billionaire who has a plane who's willing to let me take 100 dogs on the flight with me back to the U.S.," Bird, the press officer, told USA Today. And kudos as well to those back in the United States who’ve been moved to inquire about how to adopt a Sochi stray. (The Humane Society does note, though, that there are plenty of homeless pets to adopt in America.)

But all of this commendable sympathy for Sochi’s abandoned dogs points up how much more we’ve heard about animal rights than human rights over the last few weeks. While a few athletes, like Canadian snowboarder Michael Lambert and Austrian ski jumper Daniela Iraschko-Stolz, have made strong statements in Sochi, we haven’t heard much at all from Olympians about non-dog-related issues. It’s not for a lack of problems that need addressing. Human Rights Watch’s page on “Russia’s Olympian Abuses” notes the country’s 2013 passage of anti-gay propaganda laws, as well as a number of other disturbing transgressions: the fact that more than 50 journalists have been murdered in Russia in the last 22 years; that Sochi’s venues were built by more than 70,000 migrant laborers who toiled ceaselessly in violation of Russian law; and that in “one village, Olympic construction destroyed local drinking wells, leaving villagers with no reliable drinking water source for years.” A Russian activist who has worked to track the environmental damage caused by the games was recently sentenced to three years in a labor camp.

Human Rights Watch also reports that approximately 2,000 families were forcibly resettled on account of Olympic construction, with some of them receiving no compensation. These compulsory evictions, the New York Times said in that Feb. 5 article, likely explain why many of the Sochi strays were abandoned: Families have left their pets behind because the Russian government demolished their homes.

Sochi’s animal crisis, then, can best be understood as a proxy for a human one. So why aren’t any athletes—or, really, all that many journalists—talking about that human crisis?

That was my experience when I covered the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina for Slate in 2005. Less than two weeks after the storm made landfall, I rode in a rescue boat with a search-and-rescue squad from the Army's 82nd Airborne Division. Every house in this neighborhood, Lakeview, had been completely destroyed, the residents driven out by rising floodwater. The ones who were driven out were lucky. Many people didn’t survive Katrina—more than 1,500 lives were lost in Louisiana alone.

And yet, I don’t recall getting a single email from a reader wondering what might happen to the people who’d been displaced. I did, however, receive dozens upon dozens of messages from readers about the “frail-looking cat” that I’d spotted briefly before it skittered away. The emails kept coming and coming and coming: Why hadn’t the Army saved the cat? What were the cat’s GPS coordinates? How could I say that there were “no signs of life” when so many animals needed rescuing? (I meant “signs of human life,” but many did not forgive me for failing to make that distinction clear.)

In New Orleans, like in Sochi, the suffering of these animals was a consequence of human suffering. How could it possibly be that the human half of that equation doesn’t tug at us as strongly? In her Guardian column, Long writes “that many people view animals as innocent and helpless, similar to children. How we treat the weakest in our society is a reflection of who we are.” That is certainly true. But it’s also a reflection of who we are that we find it so much easier to love an abandoned puppy than to sympathize with an exploited laborer, or a Russian man who’s persecuted on account of his sexual preference, or a family that’s been kicked out of its home to build and Olympic venue.

It’s easy, relatively, to save a Russian dog. It’s much harder to help workers, to speak out against intolerance, or to challenge a government. I commend everyone who’s stepped forward to help Sochi’s animals, and I don’t begrudge any Olympic athlete for making the choice to keep her head down, compete in the event she’s trained for all her life, and stay quiet about issues of human rights. But it would be heartening if, before the games are over, a whole bunch of athletes make a very difficult decision, choosing to speak out about what’s being done to Russian men and women, and not just man’s best friend.

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